Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week. Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery.
What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more appealing than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service.
By contrast, a “dry drunk,” in A.A.’s terms, is an alcoholic who doesn’t drink but hasn’t undergone the wholesale psychic change that is both the price and the dividend of A.A.
The logic adds up. Dry drunks must manfully resist the temptation to drink, and thus often feel deprived, like a person on a highly restrictive diet. You can think of a dry drunk as always hangry, always stuck in traffic without A.C., always quietly fuming about what the world has denied him—from career success to a hit of the crack pipe to the adulation of the whole world. Out of this sense of deprivation, dry drunks variously retreat into self-loathing, approach others with fear, or lash out in anger.
We’ve had 18 years of dry drunks in the White House, with a reprieve only with Obama, who drank in moderation. With George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump, none of whom touched a drop as president, it might be that dry drunkery, in which suppressed demons come out sideways, has become the ranking paradigm of moral character. For most of this century, then, Americans have not seen a president with a temperament worth aspiring to.
George W. Bush drank heavily for decades and gave it up when he was born again at 40. Fine. But as president, he was given to saber-rattling and warmongering that many in A.A. consider to be at steep odds with Twelve Step sobriety. Likewise, Joe Biden, who abstained, citing family history, could often be what my sober friend Beau Friedlander calls a “crispy critter”—prone to defensiveness and snippiness. Unwisely deciding to stay in the 2024 race suggests that Biden lacks the humility and self-awareness that is key to real sobriety.
And then there’s Trump. He has always maintained that he doesn’t smoke or drink, for fear of ending up like his older brother, an alcoholic who died young. And while he has periodically taken Ambien, a sedative-hypnotic tightly controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while allegations of further drug use are rampant, Trump doesn’t come off like an active addict.
Instead, he’s a quintessential dry drunk. Feeling deprived, Trump has made a career of copping resentments, indulging in self-pity, and striking out in frustration at those who least deserve it. Members of A.A. are taught to be wary of exactly the “willpower” dry drunks like Trump pride themselves on; sobriety requires letting go of alcoholic impulses, not repressing them.
All of this comes to mind just about every time the president speaks. During his interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday, he later recalled, he was driven to rage by the sound of the rain on the roof. The man is nearly 80, and anyone with a modicum of serenity should be soothed and not enraged by the sound of rain.
But he also seemed to be scanning his mind for someone to blame for his discomfort, someone to hate. “They’re crooked,” he said of one of his imagined foes, “just like you’re crooked.” Welker calmly replied, “I’m not crooked.” Trump then shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid!” Before he stormed out, stepping on his mic, he added maniacally, “Thank you darling! Have a good time!” Whether he drinks or not, this is not a sober man.
Sobriety proceeds a day at a time, and it’s hard to know what Hunter Biden’s interior life is like these days.
On the one hand, Biden has exhibited real candor and willingness to help others in his recent tweets and interviews. On the other hand, it’s not clear how close he stays to the moral demands of true sobriety. “I know what I’ve done, I know the amends I have to make,” he now says. But Lunden Roberts, the mother of one of Hunter’s children, has written movingly and without rancor about raising their daughter in Arkansas while Biden first refused to acknowledge his child, then paid less than expected in support, then seemed to ghost his daughter. Making a complete amends to one’s children and partners is usually considered a first step toward lasting sobriety.
As Hunter Biden would surely be the first to attest, the path to sobriety is winding and difficult, and, as A.A. says, “We seek progress, not perfection.” Biden’s voice is welcome in the public sphere, and not for the zingers. Rather, he has opened the possibility—just the possibility—that with attention to our moral responsibilities we Americans might one day find a less furious, more honest, and more charitable way to live.
